Hired Crew Persistence

[Zourin]

Hired crew for SLF's are really the only 'personal' interaction an Elite player has, and many have invested a lot of time and effort finding the perfect (or suitable, or only-one-left) candidate to train up. You kinda start to like the ugly man who looked like he was birthed by being kicked out of the uterus by a donkey onto a pile of bricks. He starts to kick butt and, just perhaps, you wonder why you have to keep him locked in the loo until that very moment you need to let him let out that pent up Freudian anger upon your enemies.

Then you blow up. Not in the heat of battle, but you didn't quite make it into the station before your life support ran out. Somehow, ol' Donkeybirth Brickface just couldn't get to his Remlock helmet in time, despite having a clear 15 minutes to ready for the worst. Or CORVAS decided to not unlock the toilet to let him save his own life. Whatever the cause, he's dead (consequence free, I might add), and somehow you're not. In fact, not just are you not dead, but for the low low price on offer, have every piece of your ship back. Except your badass DB. Station maintenance saw fit to remove his corpse from the toilet, at least.

Suggestion: When a ship is destroyed, allow active hired crew lost on the ship to be restored at rebuy, at the cost of requiring an additional 1% cut because you're the buffoon that nearly got him/her/it killed. This poses an interesting proposition for a player: How much are you willing to pay to keep a good pilot before parting ways? Right now, they quit die as soon as your ship blows up, but what if you could entice them to stay on the team for a little extra? At what point do you cut them loose and go your separate ways? 20%? 50%?

Also. It does get a little lonely in a 3-man cockpit by myself. Can we let him out of whatever shoebox he's locked in?

 

[metatheurgist]

I think it'd be better if they had to "rebuy" themselves using their cut of the money. Right now it's just used for nothing. And it incentivizes us to help them make money.

 

[[VR] Goooost]

I think that the whole NPC generation is too interesting to have it wasted on 3 uses per player. So I think that the crew should die, and we should feel that remorse for them and have it become part of our personal narrative. But I don't think that training up a new crew member from scratch is the next step. For one, this means that commanders won't use/risk their pilots and will disconnect rather than face the massive time and cost associated with losing that crew. I think that after a crew dies, another one should be available for hire at the same cut but a higher deposit. This would be very similar to rebuy.

If you really want your old pilot back, I can tell you after spending millions and millions on "pilot tinder" that eventually you'll see them again.

So all is not lost for those who are really persistent.

 

[citabria94]

FDEV definitely needs to let the pilots out of the loo, if they are hired they should have a spot on the bridge. Even the lowliest of red shirts from Star Trek were seen on the bridge of the Ent-D back in the day! When "player crew" are accepted to the bridge the AI crew goes away. Simple, clean and well worth it for the player experience. While we're at it, FDEV can we PLEASE see the ship kits on the HUD while docking and flying around!!![ugh]

 

[mossfoot]

I would like to have a means to get a pilot back. I'm content with my head cannon that when you lose your ship their contract with you ends and they take their millions to buy their own ship. (and if they haven't made millions, then you blew up pretty quick and why would they want to hang around you after that???)

But having more involved NPC interaction, the ability to retain them under certain circumstances (and for them to actually die and be lost forever due to a bad RNG roll) would be appreciated. So would having actual combat stats beyond just "Harmless--->Elite" - such as whether they are aggressive or cautious pilots, whether they prefer to work on defence (of your ship) or offence (fire at will!), that kind of thing.

There's a lot of potential for NPC crew I'd like to see happen (including having them appear in your multicrew chairs if currently unoccupied!)